World Gone Wrong: Giuliani Names FEMA Flunky Joe Allbaugh Senior Adviser On Homeland Security
This news snuck by on Halloween, and it's a real nightmare. The Giuliani campaign has hired Joe Allbaugh as its senior adviser on "general strategy and homeland security."
Joe Allbaugh? The guy who was George Bush's lackey when he was Governor of Texas? The guy who Bush put in charge of FEMA, with zero experience, after becoming President? The guy who hired his pal "Heck of a job, Brownie" as #2 at FEMA and then saw to it that Brownie succeeded him when Joe left in 2003 to get rich on Iraq, leaving Brownie in charge when hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast?
Yes, that Joe Allbaugh.
Rudy's got some track record when it comes to homeland security. He talked Bush into naming his own lackey Bernie Kerik as the first chief of the Homeland Security department when it was created, but that nomination went down in flames amid charges that Bernie was nothing more than a sleaze and a crook.
Back to Joe Allbaugh. In addition to his disastrous tenure at FEMA, he's also the guy who was knee deep in Bush's National Guard records saga back in 1997. A team was ordered to rifle through the old files, and Bush confidante Karen Hughes would later claim - get this - that Bush merely wanted to refresh fond memories of his National Guard days for the book she was writing for him ("A Charge To Keep"), but it's now clear that the purpose was to purge the files of any evidence documenting Bush's military malfeasance and, as the Boston Globe and others reported, subsequent AWOL Guard year back in the early 1970s.
The future president had been a first class flake, and the photo-op of him prancing around in a flight suit on the deck of an aircraft carrier after 9/11 was meant to blunt that cold hard fact.
Indeed, even though the infamous Dan Rather memos were never fully verified as originals, the 86-year old retired secretary of Bush's commanding officer told Rather that all of the damaging information in those memos was absolutely accurate because she was the one who'd typed them back then. Case closed.
But again, back to Joe Allbaugh. After he left government service (term used loosely) and was replaced at FEMA by his favored #2 Michael Brown, Joe set up a company based on nothing more than his relationship with Bush. His outfit facilitated business in Iraq for contractors who wanted to get their hands on all that war money the Congress keeps funding with taxpayer dollars, more than half a trillion now.
The man who labored to cover Bush's rear end (Rove handled the brain), and who brought us the Katrina-era FEMA and "Brownie," is now the Giuliani senior adviser on protecting America.
This would be a terrible joke, except it's real.
Posted November 2, 2007 | 10:14 AM (EST)